gist was our Word of the Day on 05/06/2014. Hear the podcast!

Examples of gist in a Sentence

Thus, Poulterers' Case gave rise to a doctrine which survives to this day: the gist of conspiracy is the agreement, and so the agreement is punishable even if its purpose was not achieved. —Wayne R. LaFave & Austin W. Scott, Jr., Criminal Law, (1972) 1986

… Einstein showed how time intervals depend on the motion of people and clocks doing the measuring. And that's the gist of relativity. —Alan Lightman, Science, January/February 1984

Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the gist of her conversation with him about the Hospital. —George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

didn't catch every word between them, but heard enough to get the gist of the conversation

Recent Examples of gist from the Web

Image Basic income is a term that gets thrown around loosely, but the gist is that the government distributes cash universally.

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The trailer is all guns and dark jungles and shadows, but the gist is these Predators are different.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'gist.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

The gist of the conversation was that .... The word gist often appears in such contexts to let us know that what follows will be a statement or summary that in some way encapsulates the main point or overarching theme. The gist of a conversation, argument, story, or what-have-you is what we rely on when the actual words and details are only imperfectly recalled, inessential, or too voluminous to recount in their entirety. Gist was borrowed from the Anglo-French legal phrase "[cest] action gist" ("[this] action lies") in the early 18th century, and was originally used in legal contexts as a term referring to the foundation or grounds for a legal action without which that action would not be legally sustainable.

Origin and Etymology of gist

Anglo-French, it lies, from gisir to lie, ultimately from Latin jacēre — more at adjacent